This Week

I will start with last Sunday (exactly one week ago). I learnt that my grandmother actually knows/knew how to play the piano. This is considered a wonderful discovery. She learnt it in secondary school but stopped after a few years. After church, my grandparents (the grandfather) drove us home. Nai nai can drive, but no one, not even herself, trusts her driving skills. When she was walking us to our house, she asked to borrow some (the only two) piano books we had. We flipped to a random page and she kind of knew how to play it. However, she said she needed to revise her theory as she wasn't that familiar with the bass clef anymore. To me, thats already an achievement because i'm only 15 and I forget things 5 times faster than her.

Yesterday, my parents bought this manual clock that has to be winded every seven days. It ticks rather loudly (I can hear it from here in the study room and it's about 15m away)and every hour, there's this "ding!" sound. The gears look very interesting. I tried holding the pendulum bob to stop it from ticking for a while. I think it lost a few seconds because of the abusive me. Hence, it decided to "ding!" very loudly to disturb my chain of thought. It can be startling if you are unprepared and irritating if you've been doing nonsense the past hour and just realised that one hour had just rotted away like that.

At around 10pm, Jean and I practiced the songs uncle lai kuen asked us to play during the worship service today. My dad was supervising us. He stood in my room and told us how the songs should feel like. Then there was this one that he classified as "romantic". Jean and I were looking at him and wishing he could play the violin and demonstrate. It sounded quite unromantic at first, but after a while, the usually unromantic dad was seen swaying with the music and smiling to himself. We usually just look from the songbook because there's SATB form there. Jean usually improvises on the melody (S) and I improvise on the harmony (A). The bass clef took some time to translate and I nearly died practicing "In moments like these (chinese)" because dad suggested I play the bass line but it took me about half a second to register the notes into a playable range.

While in the car going to church today, mom saw a vjc girl in her uniform and started recounting her school life in terms of the uniform. I learnt that she was the first batch of students in vjc and got to design the uniform. So she's one of the culprits behind that. Then in her secondary school, she said the metal buttons she had to get for her uniform had to be polished often or else they'd rust. Boys had to buy 7 buttons and girls, 5. But that actually depended on your height so if you could tuck in more of the shirt, you'd need less buttons. Then she talked about her siblings all following her footsteps, sharing the same schools. Then dad said, "you mean buttons?" and I nearly died of laughing.

So we played the six songs. My uncle edwin (dad's bro) was on the piano. We usually play with him and I also find it easier to coordinate with him. The part of the service where men are allowed to lead the worship (just go up to the mic and ask the congregation to sing something) is the scariest part for the musicians. It is more of a sight reading exercise because you never know what might crop up. I don't know which is worse, playing everything as it is in the songbook or improvising along it/going an octave higher at parts etc while sight reading. It's even worse if someone chooses a song with maybe 5 b/#s and you don't know what it sounds like. Overall, today went pretty well and my mom is getting more impressed at our playing each time.

Enough typing. Time to get on with work. I plan to watch table tennis finals tonight.